These climate-based arguments for why we should maintain cities primarily designed around the car are just… dumb. Don’t fall victim to them. There is only one effective way to reduce congestion long-term and that is reducing the need for cars. Creating streets that are safe and pleasant for people outside of cars promotes alternatives to driving. And in doing all of this, you’ll have a huge impact on the climate instead of a worthless marginal one.
Road user cost is an EXTREMELY well-studied field with hundreds of complete manuals and textbooks written on the subject. Most states have their own full guidelines. You can very, very directly quantify what the impact of things like work zones is in terms of dollar figures based on theoretical impacts to travelers. So yeah, in those terms, the DOT does put a dollar value on congestion, absolutely. Just as the EPA creates a metric for putting a dollar value on a human life when analyzing impacts of pollution.
The actual traffic study for this would be comparing an intersection with ROR AB tested to without ROR, modeling the increased delay for drivers, and translating that into a figure. A minute or two delay… actually doesn’t amount to very much, and that’s what a typical case would be of forcing a driver to wait an additional cycle. Not to mention that, in a world without ROR, there is no a very good reason to force engineers to do their fucking jobs and design the intersection to work better without that dangerous crutch.
The Philadelphia paper is the seminal work on all way stops being safer than signals in urban contexts. It is pretty definitive and similar studies have confirmed the results, cementing them into most complete streets design guides.
Studies on roundabouts being safer are… even more conclusive and abundant. I really can’t cite just one because damn, there’s so damn many.
“Creating streets that are safe and pleasant for people outside of cars promotes alternatives to driving.” I don’t disagree with this, but the problem is that in the US there often aren’t any alternatives to cars to get around. And to be frank, I’m not gonna be walking around on the streets of LA (where I live, insert your crime-ridden US metropolitan here) unless I have good reason to. Getting hit by a car due to RTOR is the least of my worries as a pedestrian. I think a lot of change is necessary (such as locations of stores, etc) beyond safe streets to reduce the need for cars. For instance, if costs of living in the city were better, people wouldn’t need to use cars to commute. Maybe it’s a starting point to fixing our transportation issue but honestly I don’t see it.
“A minute or two delay… actually doesn’t amount to very much, and that’s what a typical case would be of forcing a driver to wait an additional cycle.” You say this, and it might be the case the vast majority of the time, especially if the stoplights are separated by a large distance and there aren’t many cars, but traffic is a distributed problem and without seeing some sort of study that indicates this I don’t buy into it. During heavy traffic, if the cars from one intersection back up into a previous intersection due to reduced throughput I can’t imagine how an additional cycle is the only cost. Maybe this is just dependent on the traffic situation, because I have a natural bias to think towards traffic situations in LA (which don’t necessarily represent the rest of the US).
“The Philadelphia paper is the seminal work on all way stops being safer than signals in urban contexts.” Can you tell me who the authors of this paper are or maybe offer me a link? I would like to read it, thank you.
“Studies on roundabouts being safer are… even more conclusive and abundant. I really can’t cite just one because damn, there’s so damn many.”
Yeah so I’m pretty sure roundabouts are better in every way except for space. But if only getting more space would be easier, because surely we could just replace a lot of our roads with trains at that point right? I think roundabouts are a red herring because they literally don’t fit in most of these intersections (they don’t even have space for a left turn lane in many of the intersections I drive in). Heck, if we’re talking about space-throughput tradeoffs we could just theoretically make every single intersection a graded interchange and that would provide a huge amount of throughput (but this too is a red herring).
These climate-based arguments for why we should maintain cities primarily designed around the car are just… dumb. Don’t fall victim to them. There is only one effective way to reduce congestion long-term and that is reducing the need for cars. Creating streets that are safe and pleasant for people outside of cars promotes alternatives to driving. And in doing all of this, you’ll have a huge impact on the climate instead of a worthless marginal one.
Road user cost is an EXTREMELY well-studied field with hundreds of complete manuals and textbooks written on the subject. Most states have their own full guidelines. You can very, very directly quantify what the impact of things like work zones is in terms of dollar figures based on theoretical impacts to travelers. So yeah, in those terms, the DOT does put a dollar value on congestion, absolutely. Just as the EPA creates a metric for putting a dollar value on a human life when analyzing impacts of pollution.
The actual traffic study for this would be comparing an intersection with ROR AB tested to without ROR, modeling the increased delay for drivers, and translating that into a figure. A minute or two delay… actually doesn’t amount to very much, and that’s what a typical case would be of forcing a driver to wait an additional cycle. Not to mention that, in a world without ROR, there is no a very good reason to force engineers to do their fucking jobs and design the intersection to work better without that dangerous crutch.
The Philadelphia paper is the seminal work on all way stops being safer than signals in urban contexts. It is pretty definitive and similar studies have confirmed the results, cementing them into most complete streets design guides.
Studies on roundabouts being safer are… even more conclusive and abundant. I really can’t cite just one because damn, there’s so damn many.
“Creating streets that are safe and pleasant for people outside of cars promotes alternatives to driving.” I don’t disagree with this, but the problem is that in the US there often aren’t any alternatives to cars to get around. And to be frank, I’m not gonna be walking around on the streets of LA (where I live, insert your crime-ridden US metropolitan here) unless I have good reason to. Getting hit by a car due to RTOR is the least of my worries as a pedestrian. I think a lot of change is necessary (such as locations of stores, etc) beyond safe streets to reduce the need for cars. For instance, if costs of living in the city were better, people wouldn’t need to use cars to commute. Maybe it’s a starting point to fixing our transportation issue but honestly I don’t see it.
“A minute or two delay… actually doesn’t amount to very much, and that’s what a typical case would be of forcing a driver to wait an additional cycle.” You say this, and it might be the case the vast majority of the time, especially if the stoplights are separated by a large distance and there aren’t many cars, but traffic is a distributed problem and without seeing some sort of study that indicates this I don’t buy into it. During heavy traffic, if the cars from one intersection back up into a previous intersection due to reduced throughput I can’t imagine how an additional cycle is the only cost. Maybe this is just dependent on the traffic situation, because I have a natural bias to think towards traffic situations in LA (which don’t necessarily represent the rest of the US).
“The Philadelphia paper is the seminal work on all way stops being safer than signals in urban contexts.” Can you tell me who the authors of this paper are or maybe offer me a link? I would like to read it, thank you.
“Studies on roundabouts being safer are… even more conclusive and abundant. I really can’t cite just one because damn, there’s so damn many.”
Yeah so I’m pretty sure roundabouts are better in every way except for space. But if only getting more space would be easier, because surely we could just replace a lot of our roads with trains at that point right? I think roundabouts are a red herring because they literally don’t fit in most of these intersections (they don’t even have space for a left turn lane in many of the intersections I drive in). Heck, if we’re talking about space-throughput tradeoffs we could just theoretically make every single intersection a graded interchange and that would provide a huge amount of throughput (but this too is a red herring).